The Honours (11 page)

‘Near the pond,' Daddy said, then grimaced at some gut-deep pain. ‘I . . . I didn't know what to do.' He held out his hands, an offering. Onlookers gasped and groaned. Mother put three thin fingers to her mouth but made no sound.

Dr Lansley was on the other side of the room, jabbing the bell button.

‘For God's sake, someone fetch him a towel. Stop gawping!'

Delphine followed Mr Propp through stinking, smoking guests, towards Daddy.

‘Come on, Giddy,' Mother was saying, tugging at his shoulder, ‘let's get you dry. Come on, Giddy . . . '

‘I didn't know what to do,' Daddy muttered, over and over. He glanced down, screwed his eyes shut, chewed at the air. A moment later, he looked again. His agony was almost ecstatic.

At Daddy's shoulder, a silhouette resolved itself into two great eyes, a face. Mr Propp stepped into the light. His voice throbbed like a cello. ‘Please, everyone.' He clapped twice. ‘Away.'

The exodus was instantaneous. Guests retreated to the edges of the room and Delphine found herself standing alone.

‘Brother, please.' Mr Propp placed a hand on Daddy's elbow. The outline of the revolver was clear against his purple silk robe. He leant forward and whispered something in Daddy's ear. Daddy became very still.

Gently, almost tenderly, Propp scooped the gooey mass from Daddy's hands. Daddy stared down into the hollow of his palms. Propp walked away.

As he moved beneath the chandelier, Delphine saw. Mud dripped from something round and smooth – curved interlocking plates like a shoulder pauldron on a suit of armour. Reddish. Bits of straw twitched in the mush. She only caught a flash of it, but in that instant she swore she saw it
move
– flexing, jawing apart as if alive.

Propp walked to the sideboard and calmly dumped the thing into
a silver ice bucket. He turned, his eyes closed, and gestured towards the bucket.

‘Is dodosh. Um . . . ' He stirred fingers in front of his brow. ‘Jean-Leonard!
Comment est-ce qu'on dit “crapaud” en anglais
?'

‘Toad, Monsieur Propp,' came a voice from the crowd.

‘Ah!
Bien sûr
.' He opened his eyes. ‘It is dead toad.'

Whatever the thing was, Delphine knew it was no toad. It was too big.

On the other side of the room, Daddy stumbled. Mother tried to take his arm but he yanked it away. He was beginning to shiver. A dullness had come into his eyes. Delphine had seen it before. Soon, he would sleep.

Alice the maid arrived, wrinkled her nose at the mess and said she would fetch towels. Propp held out the ice bucket for Dr Lansley.

‘Please. Remove.'

Lansley glanced inside. His upper lip curled. He snatched the bucket from Propp's grasp and marched off.

Delphine felt washed out and nauseous. She watched Mother try again to take Daddy's arm. This time, he relented. Mother led him out of the drawing room.

A low restlessness agitated the remaining guests – the sort of half-concerned, half-pettish muttering prompted by a late curtain at the opera. Professor Carmichael poured himself a very large whisky. Delphine felt a tap on her elbow.

She turned to see Miss DeGroot, holding a brandy glass.

‘You okay?' said Miss DeGroot. She was smiling. ‘Delphine, isn't it?'

Delphine nodded, studying Miss DeGroot's eyes for slyness or mockery. Miss DeGroot watched her steadily. Delphine flushed and dropped her gaze, focusing on the blue swallow print of Miss DeGroot's capelet against the white of her throat.

‘Here. Don't tell your Mother I gave you this.' Miss DeGroot held out the glass. In the bottom was a dribble of brandy.

‘Uh, no thank you.'

‘Don't be polite. You've had a rough evening. It'll help you sleep.' She jiggled the glass and the brandy swirled round and round.

Delphine hesitated. She took it, her fingertips brushing the cold silk of Miss DeGroot's glove. She sniffed the brandy, tried to suppress a gag. She shut her eyes and emptied the glass into her mouth. It tasted like Daddy's studio.

When she opened her eyes Miss DeGroot was nodding.

‘You don't let anyone push you around, do you?'

Delphine looked down at the carpet, her throat and cheeks burning.

A hubbub arose at the west end of the banqueting hall. Alice had returned. She was pushing a wooden wheelchair. Sitting in the chair, his knees covered by a custard-coloured blanket, was Lazarus Robert Stokeham, 4th Earl of Alderberen.

‘What on earth happened here?' said Lord Alderberen, kicking a slippered foot.

Delphine had once read
^*
that cobra venom worked by making the blood coagulate, clogging arteries until the heart puffed out and exploded in an eruption of clotting gore. She had long imagined the sensation – the squeezing, aching pain shooting down from the wrist, following a webwork of veins and capillaries to smash, like a crossbow bolt, into the clenched sac of the heart. She felt something close to that now.

She knew the voice, the slippers, and the blue stockings within them. Lord Alderberen had been the one talking to Mr Propp back in the room all those weeks ago. They were in league. Of course they were.

Delphine stared at the puddled space where Daddy had stood. Electric fish glowed in mirror pools. Reflected in the water, the chandelier hung like a trap, about to snap shut.

*
The Society for the Perpetual Improvement of Man.

*
Boys' Adventure Weekly
, Issue #312.

CHAPTER 7

THE CURSE OF THE STOKEHAMS

May 1935

A
few days after the symposium, Delphine sat by the fire in Mr Garforth's cottage, steaming open letters. The copper kettle gubbled over the flames. She used a pair of coal tongs to pass an envelope through the steam, watching the paper corrugate like the lips of a clam.

She had waited for the postman's van and greeted him at the back door with a curtsey. He had not even asked her name. It had been a masterstroke of espionage.

She practised on Professor Carmichael's correspondence, building up her nerve. One was a typewritten slip, thanking him for his essay: ‘It does not meet our needs at this time. We wish you all success placing it elsewhere.' Beneath, scrawled in blue ink, were the words: ‘no SAE = no MS return!'. A second contained the Quarterly Newsletter from ENVELOPE.
^*
A final handwritten letter from someone called Walter (‘your chum, always') comprised several pages complaining about the author's ‘Hellish time' at All Souls
^†
.

When Delphine tried to reseal the letters, she discovered she had
held them in the steam too long and the gum had melted. She managed to stick the flaps down with a little paste, but they looked all bendy.

No matter. The Professor had nothing to hide; he would not be looking for signs his mail had been tampered with. Perhaps he would think the postman had dropped his letters in a puddle. Delphine put them back in her rucksack, along with the others, and moved on to the central object of her investigation.

Seven letters were addressed to Mr I. Propp or Mr Ivanovich Propp, including one to ‘Dr Propp'. She applied steam cautiously. Delphine licked her lips and ran a butter knife along the back of the first envelope. The flap yielded wetly. The cottage was empty. She had an hour before luncheon, at which point the post would be missed.

The letters that followed featured more of the same. Beneath her fingers, they felt faintly warm and damp. They were written on high-quality, thick-gauge paper – the sort she imagined was used by diplomats and viscounts and rich financiers of global intrigues. She found nothing explicitly incriminating, but if Mr Propp was receiving messages from continental spies, it stood to reason they would use
code. Perhaps the names of conditions? She jotted down ‘rheumatic shoulder' and ‘nervous collapse'.

All the envelopes contained cheques, except the last:

She read and reread the letter. The cottage seemed to tilt like an ocean liner. Surely this was a message from one agent to another. And what were those first four words? She thought that ‘chien' might be French for dog.

The door swung open and Mr Garforth entered, rain-wet and snorting. He threw his coat off and made a beeline for the fire.

‘Oh, good. You've put the kettle on.'

Delphine tried to hide the letter but the sudden movement drew his attention.

‘What's that?' he said.

‘Nothing. Post.'

Mr Garforth sat in the chair beside the fireplace and slapped moisture from his scalp. His boots came off with a thump. He looked at the heap of opened envelopes.

‘Someone's popular.'

‘It's nothing.' She gathered them up, trying to remain calm. ‘Correspondence chess.'

‘You? A chess-player?' He glanced at the kettle. ‘That's dry-boiled.'

‘Well, you took too long.'

‘Nonsense. I'm back early on account of the drizzle. How does that work, then, chess by post?'

‘Oh, I don't know,' she said. Mr Garforth raised his eyebrows. ‘I mean, I don't care. I'm giving up. It's boring.'

Mr Garforth made an ‘umph' sound behind his teeth. ‘No patience. Let's have a look.' He reached for the letters.

She clasped them to her chest. ‘No, it's stupid.'

‘I'll be the judge of that.' He leaned forward, grasping. ‘Maybe I can talk some sense into – hey!'

With a flick of her wrist, Delphine cast Mr Propp's letters into the fire. They rolled with the updraft, flared and crumpled. What had she done?

Mr Garforth glared at her. ‘That was damn foolish.'

She bit down against the cold panic rising in her chest. He was right.

‘Sorry,' she said. ‘I didn't want you to see how rotten I am at chess. I'm a bad loser. It doesn't matter.'

He looked at her for a long time. At last, he said: ‘Right, then. Fill the kettle.'

Delphine rose, glad of something to do. In the fireplace the remains of Propp's letters flickered like votive candles, secrets vanishing up the chimney in twists of black smoke.

The next morning, a car arrived containing Mr Kung. He wore round eyeglasses and carried a small brown suitcase with a paper tag attached to the handle. The tag flapped in the wind as he stood before the Hall, staring. Delphine watched him from her bedroom window. His mouth was open and he kept putting a hand on his bowler hat to stop it blowing away. He looked like a man about to step into the belly of a whale.

Delphine let the curtain fall back across the pane.

On her bed was a gun catalogue, open at a colour double-page spread of sidelock ejectors. She clothes-pegged it to a wire coat hanger, slipped a powder-blue frock over the top, then hung it in her wardrobe. Another twelve or so catalogues were stashed in a hat box wedged behind a joist in the attic. Beside the hat box was her old suitcase. She had poked airholes in the lid. There was shredded newspaper for bedding, a twig for gnawing, an old Bournville cocoa tin for a nest, a saucer of water and whatever food she managed to sneak up from the kitchen (the previous evening it had been a bit of sausage saved from dinner). Delphine had christened the rat Vicky.

Though Mother had never explicitly forbidden gun literature, she
was a capricious god. Texts bearing the whiff of heresy might be seized and confiscated, or torn to scraps. Indeed, any item Delphine betrayed a fondness for became territory ripe for annexation in Mother's neverending war on delinquency.

Like anyone living under an occupying power, Delphine had devised ingenious methods for hiding contraband. She spent many hours in the attic, reading by the light of a bare electric bulb and listening to Vicky rustle and chirp. Her bedposts, it turned out, were hollow, and by unscrewing the bedknob and stuffing a woollen stocking a foot or so down, she had created a secret cache for sweets, matches and beautiful pebbles found on the tideline.

Communications were the war's primary front. Mother was liable to intercept any correspondence addressed to Delphine, so she requested catalogues as ‘Miss P. DeGroot'. This was mainly because Miss DeGroot was a part-time resident and seldom checked her letters (she liked to let them build to a suitably impressive stack before opening them, conspicuously, one after another in the drawing room, gutting each envelope with an ivory-handled fruit knife) though, since their exchange at the symposium, Delphine rather fancied that if Miss DeGroot did one day find out, she would approve.

As it was, the rigmarole of the deception – the writing of a short covering letter, the copying of the manufacturer's address onto an envelope, the long walk to buy stamps at the sub post office in Pigg – these small, everyday tasks made her feel like an outlaw, a smuggler. They set a warm rush going in her chest that made her climb the stairs three at a time. Sometimes she became convinced that Mother was onto her, that something in her face had betrayed her; at other times, she felt serenely invincible. When Mother chided her for some imagined crime such as running in the hallway or frowning, Delphine felt her growing collection of secrets snug around her waist like a dynamite belt.

She stepped out onto the landing. The maid Alice was leading Mr Kung through the Great Hall. Mr Kung had his bowler clasped to his chest. He bent over to stroke Zeno, the Hall's resident tortoise, who was in the process of crossing the threshold between two tiles.

Mr Propp emerged from a door beneath the stairs. His flat feet
slapped against the black and white tiles. He saw Mr Kung and beamed.

‘But what is this? I thought you do not come for one, two weeks! I trust you had pleasant journey?'

‘Yes, thank you,' said Mr Kung, bowing slightly. His black hair thinned around the crown like the grass on a batting crease.

Mr Propp said something hearty in a language that might have been Russian or Mandarin. Mr Kung replied with vigour. The two had several rapid exchanges then Propp turned to Alice and said: ‘Two coffees, drawing room, if you please.'

‘Yes, Mr Propp.' Alice nodded and smiled in that half-impertinent way of hers, and disappeared through a side door.

‘Ah, Edmund, my dear friend.' Mr Propp's words echoed up into the domed roof, and down the back of Delphine's neck. Here was the sender of Propp's letter. Propp squeezed the newcomer's shoulder. ‘I am glad you arrive. We have so much to do.'

She watched Propp lead him away. Kung's head craned and swivelled as he took everything in. His movements had an urgency Delphine did not like. She could not help but think he was hunting for something.

Professor Carmichael called Delphine to his desk. Without raising his head, he flourished her latest essay, 1,000 words on
Hamlet
.
^*

Delphine took it. The Professor did not let go.

‘Not exactly according to Cocker, Miss Venner.' His hand unclenched. ‘But a certain originality of thought, nonetheless. Take one.' His fingers tapped a paper bag. ‘Go on.'

Delphine stared.

The Professor peered over a pair of imaginary spectacles. He glanced at the bag uncertainly. ‘What's the matter? Don't you like 'em?'

Delphine teased open the mouth of the bag with a finger. It was full of wine gums.

‘Oh no, I like them.'

‘Take one, then.'

In the shadow cast by the lip of the bag it was hard to tell which colour was which. Delphine plucked out a red one, put it back, pulled out another red, put it back, and finally found a green.

‘Thank you, Professor.' She popped it into her mouth. When her molars met, the jolt of juicy sourness made her toes curl.

‘It's not a gift. It's a reward. Rest assured there will be punishments also.' His gaze drifted to the abominations under glass. ‘Punishment and reward. The two great engines of pedagogy.' He grinned and made a noise in his throat.

On the desk was a pile of foolscap, the top sheet of which was covered in the Professor's familiar runic scrawl. The title was in block capitals. Delphine read it upside-down:
RAISING MU: HOW TO TACKLE COMMON OBJECTIONS TO LOST CONTINENTS
.

‘What's that about?' she said.

The grin disappeared. ‘Nothing you'd understand.'

‘Is it for the Society?'

The Professor put down his fountain pen. ‘I may present it to them at some time, yes. Have you finished your arithmetic?'

‘What do you think of Mr Propp?'

‘What I think and what I write is none of your business. Your business lies solely with the heady world of long division, which I,' he cupped a hand to his ear, ‘ah, yes, I do believe I hear it calling to you. Do you hear that? Now, off with you.'

Delphine walked back to her desk, the dregs of the wine gum snug in the hollow of her back tooth. When she glanced up at the Professor, his patchy beard could not quite disguise the faintest rumour of a smile.

Mr Propp called a special afternoon orientation. Delphine was supposed to be patrolling the box traps for Mr Garforth, but Mother had said the meeting was for all guests and residents.

‘Your father needs your support. Your
silent
support.'

Mr Propp sat in a leather club chair, white moustache sagging over the stem of a large black pipe. The residents faced him in a loose horseshoe. Delphine wafted tobacco smoke out of her face, eyes watering. He placed his pipe on the arm of the chair and clapped his hands – big, heavy claps, like someone beating a carpet.

Lord Alderberen permitted smoking anywhere within the Hall, but in the smoking room it rose to a contact sport. Contenders stuffed pipes, lit cigarettes with cigarettes and cut expensive foreign cigars with miniature guillotines. When Propp clapped his hands, all activity stopped. He basked in the fresh silence.

‘You are asleep,' he said. He said that life was a war against sleep and everyone, everyone in the room, flinging opprobrium left and right, was losing. ‘You are no more master of your destiny than feather in stream. You are, you are, uh . . .
quel est le mot juste
?' He circled his palm, snapped his thick fingers. ‘Ah! You are
insensible
to life.'

Delphine sipped her Vimto, stewing.

‘You must take dissatisfaction you feel, deep in here,' he beat a fist against his chest, ‘and deep here,' he thumped his belly, ‘and push up, up,' he mimed a volcano surging through his body, ‘until, at last, gets here.' His hands came to rest on his bald head.